Identification Guides - SHADOW & GHOST WOODS

Today, we see shadows and imprints of an ancient ecology in the modern landscape. Old meadows and pastures, ancient heaths, medieval coppice woods, and similar features bear testimony to this remarkable lineage. Ancient parks are the most visibly obvious remnants of formerly extensive grazed wooded landscapes. However, even where deer parks survive (and this is rare), they do so as unique landscapes separated in time and function from their origins. It may be that the greater medieval parks have shared common origins from the legacy of Vera’s primeval savanna. However, other areas, upland moors and moorland fringe, and lowland heaths, commons and downs, probably reflect this same lineage; even today, many of these lands are grazed, and many have ancient albeit small, trees. These are the lands unenclosed in medieval times and linked, albeit tenuously, to Vera’s open, fluid primeval landscape. For example, some of the species-rich grasslands such as the Derbyshire Dales limestone pastures are in effect, the remains of the open areas of Vera’s landscape. Here are anciently complex, species-rich grasslands within landscapes of hazel and patches of ancient woodland (identified by Donald Pigott in the 1960s). These and other wooded sites are now being recognised as ‘shadow woods’ or ‘ghosts woods’; either relicts from once obviously ancient woodland sites, or perhaps more excitingly, ancient wooded landscapes until now overlooked.

Parks are the most obvious landscapes that mix trees and grazing animals. However, once one starts to examine the landscape more critically, it is apparent that many other systems have a similar approach. Heaths, commons, and unenclosed pastures (like Longshaw, North Derbyshire), mix ancient trees and open grazing lawns with long-term continuity of management to match that of the nearby Chatsworth Park. A major difference is that ancient trees in these landscapes are generally small and may be species such as hawthorns, which are often overlooked. Examining ecology and soils in these wider landscapes reveals the imprint or ‘shadow’ of former ‘woodland’ status; they are ‘ancient wooded landscapes’.

English wooded landscapes result from millennia of human interaction with nature. Their early beginnings were as various forms of pasture woods, and originally an expansive patchwork landscape of forest, wetland, grassland and other naturally occurring ‘habitats’ with large grazing herbivores. The descendants of these original ecosystems and landscapes persist today as woods and other ‘unimproved’ landscape features, and as ‘shadows’ and ‘ghosts’. In this context, a new and emerging challenge for our research concepts and paradigms is to step outside the boundary of the medieval ‘woods’ in search of the shadows, ghosts, and footprints of a wider wooded landscape. In particular, the recognition of ‘grazed wooded landscapes’, and of ‘shadow woods’, is especially significant. Indeed, the recent recognition of the wider resource of ancient wooded landscapes has provided further impetus for such studies.

The idea or concept of ‘Ghost’ or ‘Shadow’ woods, as I have called them, came from thirty years or more of field survey and historical research into woodlands, heaths, moors, bogs and fens. Along with the concepts of the ‘eco-cultural nature of landscapes’ and of ‘cultural severance’, this begins to unify our vision of landscape yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The ghosts are there in moors, heaths and grasslands, from extensive grazed ‘woods’ to tiny pockets of roadside verge. You have only to look.